What We Need to Understand

There once lived a man who wrote as might a saint. His name was Rudyard Kipling. He was born in 1865 and he died in 1936. He was among the most popular writers in his day, AND he remains so to this day. The recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, he was a journalist, novelist, short-story writer and poet. He was born in British India, from which his inspiration came. His books (like The Jungle Book, Kim and The Just So Stories) and above all his poetry (such as Mandalay, Gunga Din, and the White Man’s Burden”) elevate us and leave us breathless. His children’s books remain widely read classics.

Today, I will focus on two of his many works. Firs, his poem about understanding, which is about your need and my need to understand our fellow man and to help all that we can. It is captioned, “If We Only Understood”. Hear now Kipling’s words on understanding:

IF WE ONLY UNDERSTOOD

Could we draw aside the curtains

That surround each other’s lives,

See the naked heart and spirit,

Know what spurt the action gives –

Often we would find it better,

Purer than we judge we would;

We’d love each other better

If we only understood

Could we judge all deeds by motives

That surround each other’s lives,

See the naked heart and spirit,

Know what spur the action gives,

Often we should find it better,

Purer than we judge we would,

We should love each other better,

If we only understood.

If we knew the cares and trials,

Knew the efforts all in vain,

And the bitter disappointments,

Understood the loss and gain –

Would the grim eternal roughness

Seem – I wonder – just the same?

Should we help where we hinder?

Should we pity where we blame?

Ah, we judge each other harshly,

Knowing not life’s hidden force;

Knowing not the fount of action

Is less turbid at its source;

Seeing not amid the evil

All the golden grains of good.

And we’d love each other better,

If we only understood.”

Rudyard Kipling (1910)

Reflect on those words for hours. They will enrich you.

Since I am allotted more time today, I will share with you yet another of Kipling’s gems, a masterpiece entitled simply “IF”:

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—what is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling

What can we take away from these masterpieces? Many things. To decipher them properly, we would need to take them stanza-by-stanza and analyze their likely meanings. Our limited time does not allow that. At the risk of gross over-simplification, I’ll offer these observations.

“If We Only Understood” focuses on understanding other people, on accepting the premise that others are very much like us. The poem “IF” deals more with learning to accept the ups and downs of life and urges us to keep doing our best no matter what.

From these poems, we see that others suffer similar degrees of anxiety, anger, indecision, self-pity and even self-contempt – all of which others and we MUST resist. If and when we can accept that our problems can manifest themselves in many ways, one of which is stuttering, and when we accept that others are in very similar boats (with or without stuttering), we can begin to accept ourselves. SELF-ACCEPTANCE will solve many of our problems, including stuttering. It is required to achieve mental peace.

So, whether you are taller or shorter, thinner or stouter, smarter or dumber, than most, in your opinion. the differences are generally much less than we think. Over 90% of us are withing the range of normal. We are NOT much below or above the normal-range. We MUST accept that fact. We can and will stop stuttering with the methods given by WSSA, which are in my books. Once we have stopped having humiliating stuttering incidents, we can work on becoming THE BEST THAT WE CAN BE. If we really work at that, most of us will rise to the higher end of “normal’ in whatever we choose to do. We can and will stop humiliating stuttering, AND we will achieve most of our reasonable goals. Take it to the bank, and that’s not so bad.

So, next time you look in the mirror, cut yourself some slack. Just keep doing your best at whatever you do and be as loving as you can be AND KEEP DOING YOUR TWICE DAILY MTT’S FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, and guess what? You’re going to have a very good life!

So, I now leave you with one sentence, as written by the iconic novelist, Tolstoy, who wrote this in his novel, “War & Peace”:

“To understand all is to forgive all.”

So, then, the first poem focuses mainly on understanding and forgiving others and the second poem focuses on grappling with life’s problems and on forgiving ourselves. I urge you to now begin to do your best to achieve both of the goals of both poems. It’s a life’s work. Heaven knows, I’m still working on it and will be as long as I live. Join me and elevate your life a bit more every single day, forever.